14. You have no doubt put down your ignorance, by your resignation of royalty and resorting to this forest; your mind is of course cast down by it, but it is not yet destroyed by the sword of your resignation. (A cast down or sunken spirit or mind is not really killed, but revives and lives again in time). 15. It rises again and gains renewed strength and minding its former defeat, it has at last over powered on you by confining you in this wilderness; and restraining you in the painful dungeon of your false asceticism. 16. If you can but now kill your fallen ignorance in any way, it will not be able to destroy you at once in your rigorous penance; though it has reduced you to this plight by your abdication of royalty. 17. The ditch that the huntsman had dug to circumvent the elephant, is verily this painful pit of austerity, which thy ignorance has scooped to enthral you in. 18. The many provisions and supplies with which the huntsman had filled the hollow, in order to entice the elephant; are the very many expectations of future reward, which your ignorance presents before you, as the recompense of your penitence. 19. O prince, though you are not the witless elephant (gaja-murkha); yet you are not unlike the same, by your being cast in this forest by your incorrigible ignorance. 20. The ditch of the elephant, was verily filled with the tender plants and leaves for the fodder of the elephant; but your cave is full of rigorous austerities, which no humanity can bear or tolerate. 21. You are still encaged in this prison house of the ascetic's cell, and doomed to undergo all the imaginative torments of your penance and martyrdom. You verily resemble the fallen Bali, that is confined in his subterranean cell. 22. You are no doubt the empty headed elephant, that art fast bound in the chain of false rigours, and incarcerated in this cave of your ignorance; thus I have given the full exposition of the parable of the elephant of Vindhyan mountain, and now glean the best lesson for thyself from this. CHAPTER LXXXXII. THE PRINCE'S ABJURATION OF HIS ASCETICISM. Argument.--The prince coming to his sense, took all his relics of asceticism and set them on fire. Chúdálá continued:--Tell me prince, what made you decline to accept the advice of the princess _Chúdálá_, who is equally skilled in morality, as well as in Divine knowledge. 2. She is an adept among the knowers of truth, and actually practices all what she preaches to others; her words are the dictates of truth, and deserved to be received with due deference. 3. If you rejected her advice, by your over confidence in your own judgment; yet let me know, why she prevented you not, from parting with your all to others. (There is a proverb that men should rely on their own judgment and that of their elders; but never on those of other people and women).